What We Want. Various Authors
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rellgion as dependent for its existence and preservation upon the guarantee of a previously revealed metaphysic. The authors of this Letter have very shrewdly pointed out that in practice religious teaching has always dispensed with its supposed metaphysical basis, and grounded itself in experience. Even the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Eucharist, the most metaphysical in their precise definition of all the doctrines of the Church, cannot be taught to simple souls save in terms of that actual religious experience out of which the doctrinal definitions originally grew.
Yet it may naturally be felt by some by some that the authors of the Letter have, in their anxiety to place themselves at the modern point of view, especially in philosophical questions, conceded to it more than was absolutely necessary—more, even, than it itself demands. "It is our mind," they say in the name of modern critical philosophy, "which by its operation creates the things whose aspects only at a given moment we know" ("È il nostro spirito che agisce e crea le cose delle quali noi conosciamo solo gli aspetti in un dato momento"). There may seem, here and in the passage which follows, to be a denial of anything immediate and objective in our knowledge of reality. Such a representation of the results of critical philosophy can hardly be justified. That the mind in its operations is from the very beginning in immediate and vital touch with a permanent and objective reality, that its subjective representations are consistently determined by the character of that objective world as once and for all given, that the categories of the understanding are in their last analysis the forms of a necessary relation between our own minds and the world of fact, and therefore possess something of an objective character—these are positions which critical philosophy not only does not deny, but increasingly tends to affirm. Yet with this reservation—and it is a reservation which probably the authors of this Letter would themselves make—it remains true that our knowledge is "subjective, relative, and susceptible of transformation and variation according to the evolution of the human mind."
Liberals outside the Roman Communion are still a little bewildered by the boldness and courage of this movement within the Roman pale. They are still haunted by the invincible prejudice that no good thing can come out of Rome. They believe that a crusade on behalf of truth and freedom, undertaken under the conditions which communion with Rome imposes, is chimerical and foredoomed to failure. But, after all, no project is chimerical for which men are willing to fight and to suffer, and no project is worth much which does not impose upon its champions this double necessity. The men who are resisting absolutism in the Roman Church know well that it is a mountain they are attempting to remove. But they have not set their hands to the task without counting the cost and remembering the conditions of its successful accomplishment. If they are fighting absolutism, they are fighting it in the unhesitating faith that it is the last and worst of heresies. We who are outside the Roman Communion are too ready to believe that absolutism is the indispensable dogma, the normal and necessary form, of Roman religion. We may, indeed, be pardoned for holding that behef, for a triumphant Ultramontanism has for a whole century been dinning it into our ears. It is, as a Liberal Catholic has recently affirmed,[1] the very triumph of Ultramontanism to have created that belief. But these men are fighting this particular form of heresy, and they will continue to fight until their Church has been delivered from the grip of the monster which is now strangling its spiritual life.
Nor, apart from the present decisive influence of the absolutist idea a absolutist party within the Roman Church, is it unnatural that the attempt to revive in Christianity the temper of Catholic intelligence and sympathy should be made within that Church, just as it is being made elsewhere. Rome is still the vital nucleus of that society which exists as an instrument for the making of the kingdom of God. She alone reaches out into all lands, speaks through all languages, reconciles all differences of human condition and circumstance in the unity of one great human hope. Her dissolution would be the dissolution of organized Christianity over a large part of the Western world. Even Protestants ought to recognize that Protestantism is but her provincial ally, witnessing for a season in certain outposts of her dominions to the claims of truth and freedom which she, in her perverted conception of the method of unity, has for a moment forgotten or denied. Whatever she may think, Protestantism has something to teach her which it has learned through four centuries of stern and relentless struggle against her arrogant and overbearing mood. The truth is that the merely controversial struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism is a thing of the past. The real present struggle between them is a struggle for mutual assimilation. Each needs the other, each has begun to feel that need, and, as is perhaps natural, each is unwilling to admit it too frankly. But it is to the honour of the Liberal Catholics that they believe enough in their own Church to face courageously and sincerely the character and the measure of her needs, and to seek to supply them whencesoever it may be possible.
Yet it is not from Protestantism in its narrow and ecclesiastical sense that the Roman Church can derive that which she most needs, just as it is not in an ultramontane Romanism that Protestantism can find that Catholic spirit and temper after which it longs. The world of religious reality, the world of moral aspiration and endeavour, has widened out beyond the range of these two conflicting forces. They both alike have to reconquer a world which is steadily slipping away from their grasp. And to reconquer that world they must understand it and help it to understand them. The Church cannot effectively accomplish her work of apostolate in a world which she has cut off from her sympathy and intelligence. The weapons of excommunication and anathema may avail in a society which believes in their power, which acknowledges the authority of him who wields them; but it is as ludicrously futile to utter an anathema against an unbelieving world as it is to try to frighten a man of mature years by calling "Bogie!" The authors of this Letter are but attempting to remind their Church of the conditions under which alone she can hope to accomplish successfully her mission to this generation. And even if some may think that they have occasionally conceded more than the actual conditions of thought and knowledge require, yet all generous minds will gratefully recognize the high nobility of their aim and the general wisdom and insight of their actual attempt.
A. L. LILLEY.
July, 1907.
⁂ I have appended to my translation an occasional footnote in explanation of allusions which might be obscure to the English reader.
1 ↑ See The Nation of June 15, 1907, p. 597
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